Methods of synthesizing polymer sequences such as nucleotide and peptide sequences are known. Synthesis of individual oligonucleotides is described in Oligonucleotide Synthesis: A Practical Approach, Gait, ed., IRL Press, Oxford (1984), incorporated herein by reference in its entirety for all purposes. Similarly, the “Merrifield” solid phase peptide synthesis has been in common use for many years and is discussed in Merrifield, J. Am. Chem. Soc. (1963) 85:2149-2154, incorporated herein by reference for all purposes.
The in situ fabrication of a plurality of polymers or “catamers,” including peptides and oligonucleotides, on a single solid support (a plurality of pins attached to a support, each pin having a unique polymer) to subsequently be used for analytical purposes was described in WO86/06487, published Nov. 6, 1986, entitled “Method for determining mimotopes,” by Hendrik M. Geysen, incorporated herein by reference for all purposes.
The combination of solid phase synthetic chemistry and photolithographic technology from the semiconductor industry allowed for the first time for the fabrication of high density arrays of polymers. See Fodor, S. P. A., Read, L. J., Pirrung, M. C., Stryer, L., Lu, A. T. and Solas, D., Light-Directed, Spatially Addressable Parallel Chemical Synthesis, (1991) Science 251, 767-773, incorporated herein by reference for all purposes.
These techniques disclosed in Fodor et al. provide for total independent access to sites on the substrate at each synthetic step, allowing for massive parallel synthesis of the desired polymer (e.g., peptide, oligonucleotide) on the array. In turn, combinatorial masking strategies allow for the fabrication of a large number of chemical entities in a relatively small number of steps. In addition, light-directed synthesis allows for a high degree of miniaturization because the density of synthesis sites is bounded only by physical limitations on spatial addressability, here the diffraction of light.
These photolithograph techniques have been employed commercially to produce high density oligonucleotide arrays which may be used, for example, to simultaneously monitor the expression of the entire set of human genes or to finely map the genome of a human subject. This technology has in turn led to diagnostic applications of the high density arrays for human disease. See www.affyrnetrix.com.